Iowa Women's Hall of Fame

The Iowa Women's Hall of Fame was created to acknowledge the accomplishments of female role models associated with the U.S. state of Iowa, and is an endeavor of the Iowa Commission on the Status of Women (ICSW).

In 1972, the state of Iowa created the ICSW to oversee women's issues, with Cristine Swanson Wilson as its first chair. During Women's History Month every March, the ICSW sponsors a public "Write Women Back into History Essay Contest". Since the Hall of Fame's beginnings in 1975, four annual nominees are inducted by the ICSW and the Governor of Iowa in a public ceremony. The event is held on Women's Equality Day, which commemorates the August 26, 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution that gave women the right to vote. The honorees are nominated by the public via online forms available on the ICSW website. The ICSW also created the annual "Cristine Wilson Medal for Equality and Justice" in 1982. Wilson was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.

The initial inductees were Iowa's first female Secretary of State Ola Babcock Miller, who created the Iowa State Patrol; president and founding member of Iowa Woman Suffrage Association, Amelia Bloomer; president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and founder of the League of Women Voters, Carrie Chapman Catt; and Annie Turner Wittenmyer who founded the Women's Christian Temperance Union, formed an aid society to support Union Army soldiers during the Civil War, as well as helped to pass pension legislation for nurses in that same war. Catt was the first inductee.

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